What is going to happen to all of these cars that are being turned in?

DanB36

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Nobody knows for sure. If VW gets a fix approved, it seems likely that at least some of them will be fixed and resold.
 

meerschm

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Fairfax county VA
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2009 Jetta wagon DSG 08/08 205k buyback 1/8/18; replaced with 2017 Golf Wagon 4mo 1.8l CXBB
Some of us are pretty sure.

Bit of a question as to exactly what the "fix" will be, but it seems pretty sure that quite a few will be made available for sale once the "fix is approved.


Give it a couple months.

You can stop by a local dealer and let them know you are interested in buying one for the right price.
 

pdq import repair

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idaho
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It would only make sense for VW to try to retail them again to recoup some of the loss. I suspect once a fix is announced, people will have faith in the cars again and they will regain popularity. Not that they were unreliable, but people read things the wrong way all the time.
 

lamboworld

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Tarheel
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In NC, there is no testing for emissions in diesel cars so it makes no difference to me what the VW fix will be. I imagine whatever fix VW deploys on the ECU can be tuned out.

I just hope that VW will find a way to sell these cars because they are going to go for cheap.
 

pknopp

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They are going to create artificial reefs out of them off the coast of Nebraska.
 

whitedog

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They are going to create artificial reefs out of them off the coast of Nebraska.
Is that the North coast of Nebraska? I can't see how they could do that. Too many contaminants in those cars. Just think of all of the NoX.
 

pcskier

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Park City Utah
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In NC, there is no testing for emissions in diesel cars so it makes no difference to me what the VW fix will be. I imagine whatever fix VW deploys on the ECU can be tuned out.

I just hope that VW will find a way to sell these cars because they are going to go for cheap.
Any fix (on the 2L) will be much more than an ECU Tune, that's for sure.
 

duratitus

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Watertown NY
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Several different models. Selling them back to VW
I don't think it is in VW's finacial intrest to fix the cars they buy back. - Here's why,

Based on the FIRST REPORT OF INDEPENDENT CLAIMS SUPERVISOR they are buying back around 80% of all the new VW diesel cars that were sold on the market in the last 7 years, and all of those former owners are going to have purchased another car before the fix is approved. - My theory is that if these former owners were interested in having a TDI with the approved fix, they would have opted for the fix instead of the buyback.

This fact means that 80% of the market for a TDI is rejecting owning a car with the modification, so the market is going to be really sluggish if they would try to sell the modified cars.

Until they go to the work to modify the cars, plus fix them up to a marketable condition, the amount they could actually sell the modified cars for, will not finacially be worth the bother, plus selling all those used cars will damage new VW car sales.

My $0.02 (which isn't even worth $0.02) is that they will go to the scrap yards.
 
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k1xv

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If I could buy back my old car for 60% of what they paid me for it, and get a reasonable warranty on it (my old warranty expired), it would be quite a deal.

Otherwise, no dice.
 

2015golfwagon

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Wouldn't they have a fix by now, heck it's been what over a year and 3 months. Maybe they will just retrofit all the cars with electric motor drives and sell the TDI motors as stationary power generators.
 

GoFaster

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There was a planned timeline set out in the consent decree documents. VW was to have proposed some of the fixes (I think it was gen 1 and 3 first) to EPA and CARB sometime in November IIRC. We don't know if this actually happened, because all of that is still happening behind closed doors. EPA and CARB have a timeline to respond and IIRC if VW made their submission on time (and whether they did that or not is not public knowledge) then the timeline of EPA and CARB to approve it or reject it comes up sometime in January 2017. The timelines between gen 1, 2, and 3 were different but the submissions were all due sometime late this year or early next with the EPA and CARB responses a couple months afterward.

VW does have a drop-dead deadline which is in early 2018.
 

crew7809

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Maryland
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14 Passat
No fix

IMHO.... VW will not get a FIX approved especially when CARB is the approval authority. Also any fix will come at a cost....to get emissions down to acceptable US levels it will decrease fuel efficiency and performance. 1st generation 2.0's will require a UREA system that is an expensive addition to not cost effective. If they were close to a fix they would have submitted it to slow down the buyback.
 

DanB36

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1st generation 2.0's will require a UREA system
No, they won't. The broad strokes of what the modification will consist of for each generation are laid out in the settlement documents, and they aren't going to be adding a DEF system to the Gen 1 cars. Whether any of the modifications will be approved is a separate question, but it's pretty well known what they'll include.
 

pdq import repair

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From what I read here and elsewhere one of the sole reasons for turn in of TDIs is financial rather than disappointment or popularity decline.

I had a conversation with my brother in law who purchased a Passat new. He likes the car and that is why he bought it. In fact after he bought his, several neighbors bought a TDI too based on his purchase. He said at first he was pissed at VW about the cheat, not because of the cheat itself as he figures the others are all doing similar things too and just haven't gotten caught. He was mad at the financial hit he got as a result of it, but now that VW has stepped up to offset that he is happy again. He said he would now consider buying another one again and even tried to when he heard they had new ones sitting on the lot unsold. He was ready to take his buyout and add a few thousand dollars to get a new TDI again.

I don't think the popularity is waning as much as the fact that people can get more than trade in value for their old cars and turn them loose for that reason alone. Again my brother in laws take is that he bought his car new and drove it 45K miles and can turn it in at 3000 less than he paid for it. He feels that is an excellent value in cars these days and would gladly turn that into a new sale, TDI only though, not a gasser.

Once the black veil is lifted from the TDIs and they are "fixed" value will go back up and you know VW will resell them if they are allowed to. A modern car company will cheapen up ignition switches by $.60 per unit to cut production costs and increase profit per unit (remember GM's fiasco?) so it is ludicrous to assume they would piss away thousands of dollars in potential income recovery on a scandal car. True they can take a writeoff if they destroy cars, but that is not financially a better deal. As my account says "you need to make it before you write it off." Recovered bad debt is much better than written off expenses I can tell you from personal experience in my business.

Time will tell, but that is my personal opinion on the matter.
 

Yukon4Runner

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Germany is gonna use them to build a wall to keep out illegal Americans from sneaking into octoberfest.
 

hex_915

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HOME
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I'd love to see them end up in junkyards with the motors intact. Cheap engine swaps!
 

pdq import repair

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I have been researching CR engine swaps and they are not the cheapest right now. You can also be sure that if VW scraps them there will be no ECU with the car, and they may even have to disable the engine altogether like the cash for clunkers deal where the wrecking yards were bound by law to fill the engine with a caustic solution that ruined them.

Let them continue on the road and we will harvest them by natural selection and attrition.
 

KITEWAGON

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We would LOVE to buy a repaired one or two. We're doing the buyback because they value the car at far more than we could get for it and it has 115K and is coming up on needing quite a bit of maintenance. If we could jump into a fixed 2014 or even better, a 2015 we would do it in a second. Thinking about a 2015 or 2016 TSI SE for a replacement for now.
 

Yukon4Runner

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2010 Golf (buyback) 2015 Golf Sportwagen (buyback buy)
That will certainly not happen if there is no approved fix. The court settlement clearly instructs how unfixed tdis are to be disposed of...right down to the size of hole that must be bored through the engine.

On the other hand, if you are looking for some "objet d'art" to hang in your house, those drilled engines will be going cheap.


I'd love to see them end up in junkyards with the motors intact. Cheap engine swaps!
 
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Virgilstar

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North Coast of the US
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jsw 11
Everything will depend on the power/MPG hit that comes with the fix, and on that topic there's a lot of speculation but zero hard evidence. It will also depend on their additional costs to bring the car back to market.

Take my 2011 JSW (please, somebody!) with 43k miles and in decent but not perfect shape. Back in July of 2015 it was worth about $13k trade-in (I know because I looked into trading it). But, I got $21k for the buyback, so that's VW's sunk cost.

The decision to sell it again is all in the additional costs for them to bring it back to market. Let's say they spend $3k for the fix (urea tank or whatever it takes), plus another $1k for refurbishment (swapping the correct wheels back on, fixing the broken windshield, buffing out the big scratch on the trunk, removing the peeling window tint job). Then consider the MPG and power hits caused by the fix, and the fact that none of this will happen until let's say summer 2017. The likelihood they can sell this 6 year old car for anything close to $13k, is zero. Maybe they'll be lucky and get $8k for it on a good day.

So, they're already sitting on $21k in sunk costs. Do they sink another $4k all to make back a measly $8k, resulting in total overall costs of $17k? That doesn't seem like much profit, and of course it's all ignoring any additional down-the-road costs associated with providing necessary warranty coverage on these re-sold vehicles (HPFP anyone?).

Do the math with newer vehicles and it gets even worse, because they're on a steeper part of the depreciation curve, so the value loss during the 2 years between scandal breakage and re-sale will have an even bigger impact.
 

k1xv

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I think you are misinterpreting the sunk cost element. They paid the $21k regardless of whether they resell it or not. Let's assume that the net cost of crushing it is zero, just to make the example simpler. As a result, they are now out $21k, regardless of what they do with it. That is why it is a "sunk" cost.

The only economic decision now is, can they sell it for more than the cost of the retrofit fix, the cost of refurbishment, and the expected cost of putting a warranty on it? And would any profit margin be worth it? Remember, if VW of A were to do this, they would be selling them "wholesale". Dealers would need to make a profit too on a retail sale.
 

DanB36

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That will certainly not happen if there is no approved fix. The court settlement clearly instructs how unfixed tdis are to be disposed of...right down to the size of hole that must be bored through the engine.

No, it doesn't. The "hole through the engine" provisions have nothing to do with TDIs.
 

buzzo

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CT
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(sold)'11 JSW ('16 340ix, '07 V70R)
The sales manager of the dealer I turned my '11 JSW TDI in to said that all buybacks will be trucked to (a) port, where they will decide which ones will be 'fixed' when a fix becomes available, at which point the dealer where the car was turned in gets first dips on buying the car for resale in their dealership.
 
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